Crip Empathography Co-creating a Graphic Novel about Parkinson’s Dance Experiences

The article combines the concept of empathography with aspects of crip methodology and theoretical reflections on the gaze in critical disability studies and, in doing so, creates a strategy for analyzing processes of co-producing a graphic novel about Parkinson’s dance. The production of the graphic novel Moving Along: a Co-Produced Graphic Novel About Parkinson’s Dance was part of a collaborative research project about dance for people with Parkinson’s disease and their relatives. The analysis is based on examples of the participatory, iterative processes of writing and drawing along with texts and images from the final graphic novel through two thematic figurations as analytic fix points, the kaleidoscope and the tree of life. By highlighting embedded spectator positions and multiple ways of looking, gazing, and staring, the analysis stirs up concerns about storytelling, empathy, and disability as a continuum of embodied difference in ways that question traditional binaries of disability/ability and illness/health(iness) related to living with Parkinson’s. On this basis, the argument is that the poetic and aesthetic processing of personal experiences of chronic illness and disability in relation to Parkinson’s dance holds a valuable critical potential as a form of crip empathography.